Early development of the City of Hanse. Created with CitiesXL 2012
Check out the Hanse Gallery in the links below for more images.

CitiesXL 2012

Review: Summary  |  Basics  |  Game Play  |  Tips and Thoughts  |  Quibles - Critique  |  Resources  
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Cities XL 2012 – Hanse City Journal

 
City Stats

Population: 2,076,460
Cash Reserves: 1,034,268,329
Income: + 349,163
Blueprints – Mega-structures: 2
Cheats: All Buildings Available
Mods: None

The City

Please check out the Hanse Gallery for dozens of screen captures from the city.

City of Hanse

Map

City of Hanse - Map

False Start Leads to Unlimited Cash

Hanse was my first attempt at a city in the game CitiesXL 2012. By the time it had reached a population of 250,000, the city was in trouble with mounting debt and not much future. The original city was poorly designed and basically a learning laboratory. I abandoned it for awhile to build the City of Icarus as a standalone city and then realized that it would be helpful to have an industrial city as a trading partner for Icarus. So I returned to Hanse and wiped away all of the city except some farm areas and the industrial area in the core of the volcano. This took some time and I noticed that once all the rest of the city was gone, that it was suddenly producing a lot of income. It had the potential for unlimited cash.

Original City Wiped Away

I checked and found that despite removing all of the roads and city hall that the electrical plants were still producing power and selling it. You can see the income from trade tokens below.

Ghost City Still Producing Income?

I removed all of the remaining artifacts of the city leaving only the electrical plants and ended up with an income of 137,000. That was pretty sweet. There wasn’t anything in the city expect power plants and it was really bringing in cash. So I let the game run in the background for a few hours until the cash reserves were over half a billion. At that point I realized that I had a huge amount of funds that would allow me to terraform to my heart’s content and so I went to work creating a level city area.

Ghost City Produces Even More Income

Terra-forming with Abundant Cash Leads to Opportunity

Having a level terrain opened up the opportunity to experiment with a circular city design. With two fairly large level areas, I built two separate circular residential and office areas on one side of the city. The picture below shows one of these areas complete and another in its early stages.

Circular City Under Construction

Circular City Design

These circular city areas did have all of the necessary city services, but were completely lacking in mass transit and leisure facilities. Despite those shortcomings, both areas grew rapidly and each ended up with a population of around 650,000 without much effort.

This was not enough population to support the industrial area and so a third traditional grid area was added near the industrial area to provide more workers.

Below is a traffic map showing the city before the addition of a metro system.

City of Hanse - Transportaton Map

The major bridges to the industrial area were highly congested. However, this did not seem to matter at all. So long as the circular core area was yellow or green, there was enough environmental quality for everything to thrive. And strange as it may seem, the residents were happy with travel.

City of Hanse - Travel Satisfaction

Industrial Area

About half of the industrial area was located in the terra-formed volcano with multiple expressway roads leading to residential areas. The top of the volcano was leveled to provide an area for waste management and an area for wind power plants (although I retained the larger and more productive electrical plants as well). The rest of the industrial area and the airport as tucked away behind the volcano and separated from residential areas with a buffer zone. This allowed one corner to be fairly well polluted without much impact on residential areas or commercial areas.

City of Hanse - Industrial Area

Growth Potential

I stopped development of this city when it was producing what was needed for trade. The city could be doubled in size easily, but would then have a problem with too many resources to sell.

My three cities ended up being too productive and it was necessary to trade the excess to Omnicorp after maximizing trade between the cities. Currently, I’m using over 90% of Omnicorp’s trading capacity for both passengers and freight. That doesn’t leave room for new cities to grow and become consumers of excess production from existing cities. So further development seemed pointless.

CitiesXL 2012

Review: Summary  |  Basics  |  Game Play  |  Tips and Thoughts  |  Quibles - Critique  |  Resources  
More Topics: Facebook Cover Art  |  Icarus City Journal  |  Icarus Gallery  |  Hanse City Journal  |  Hanse Gallery  |  Farcus City Journal  |  Farcus Gallery